Page:The Kingdom of Man - Ralph Vary Chamberlin 1938.djvu/39

Rh authority other than that of Nature herself. Through science man has ceased to be the plaything of blind forces. No longer does he face his world with haunting fear resulting from taboos. He faces it directly with the knowledge that Nature is friendly, dependable and understandable—not the expression of an unknown and capricious power intent on working him ill. He may indeed be on the knees of the gods, but these gods do not help him to his desires; he must help himself by understanding Nature and by ordering his life in conformity with her ways. In the light of past achievements, optimism and courage are justified as we work out our destiny with increasing self-consciousness and with a wider perspective. In spite of many discouraging situations and past disappointments, with the recognition of man as part of a plastic and growing nature, neither the beginning nor the end of which we can see, we may hope there is a time ahead "which shall prove that the visions of the young and the dreams of the old were prophetic of a glorious reality."

Tennyson, perplexed with the growing fear that the universe of which we are a part may be largely or wholly organized without reference to the needs of men, expressed a prevalent religious tendency of his day to accept as mysteries the things not understood when he wrote:

So runs my dream: but what am I?
 * An infant crying in the night:
 * An infant crying for the light:

And with no language but a cry."

Today the attitude is to face the unknown, not in the spirit of passive defeatism, but with courage and with the adventurous confidence of hope, in the spirit of Louis Untermeyer's Prayer:

"Ever insurgent let me be,
 * Make me more daring than devout;

From sleek contentment keep me free,
 * And fill me with a buoyant doubt."

There is a changed philosophy of life that has come with the spread of the scientific spirit and its expression in the progressive modifications in thought and in its products that have all but miraculously ameliorated the physical environment and the intellectual relations of civilized men. The emphasis today is upon the life here and now, upon the importance and righteousness of human happiness, upon the real values that inhere in the self-satisfactions of human life. Devotion to a realization of the Imperium hominis, the Kingdom of Man, Bacon wrote of, claims our major thought and effort.